Running Commentary: Catch ’em young (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Catch ’em young

Everyone knows that all state schools are short of resources. Strathclyde Regional Council have found a way to alleviate the problem. Following in the footsteps of national and local press, programmes for charity, sports events or whatever, they are selling advertising space in the exercise books used by their 422,000 schoolchildren. For 500,000 books. £2.250 will buy the back page, inside covers are slightly cheaper, and a bargain £5,400 buys all three covers and a logo on the front.

Of course, not just any advert is accepted. Cigarettes, alcohol, sweets and BMX bikes are out. (So, we are sure, would be The Socialist Party or The Socialist Standard). Road safety and health education are in. So far, so good. "We also want to encourage thrift" said the Head of Public Relations and to this end they have approached banks and building societies.

The report appears in Super Marketing 11 July 1986. It is therefore no surprise to read a little further on that Lyons Tetley are "very happy with results" of their pilot scheme, which was "very cost effective" and intend to take further space. Of course, using exercise books in school at £2,250 a throw to persuade half a million mums to send their offspring to school filled up with Ready Brek is obviously a lot cheaper than those TV commercials where kids light their way through the fog with their Ready Brek induced halos. What better way to condition the workers of tomorrow to be receptive to the siren calls of consumerism — and after all, without those advertisements there mightn't be any exercise books . . .

More on poverty

In the August Socialist Standard we pointed out that at that time the last published official figures for people living at or below the government's poverty line were based on a count taken in 1981. Another count had been taken in 1983 and this should have been published last year but the government were prudently delaying this.

Just as that Socialist Standard was produced the later figures became available; in fact they were placed in the library of the House of Commons, just as the library conveniently closed for the summer. However, details have seeped out and are not comfortable reading for those who think that life in Britain under the Tories is as happy and abundant as we were promised it would be. when the alleged monetarists were let loose in Whitehall.

In 1981, the official figures showed 7.7 million living on or below the poverty line; by 1983 this had risen to 8.8 million. A House of Commons library estimate is that by 1986 this total has risen again, to 11.7 million

This comes at a time when the Child Poverty Action Group are celebrating — or perhaps it should be mourning — their 21st birthday Formed under another name in 1965. at the time they did not bother to arrange to bank any funds because they were sure that their campaign to abolish child poverty would succeed within one year A lot of their hopes rested in the election of the 1964 Labour government, of which one Labour MP (Frank Field, Guardian, 4 August 1986) now says: "At the end of the 1964-70 Labour Government the charge was that the poor had got poorer under Labour' ". The CPAG soon learned a little about the reality of working class poverty and what Labour governments are in power for By the end of their first year they had opened a bank account and had changed themselves from an advisory group into an action group.

Like so many apparently well-intentioned reformist bodies. CPAG have probed, exposed and agitated. But, typically, they overlooked the fact that working class poverty is basic and unavoidable under capitalism, whichever party is in power. When they were formed in 1965 there were less than 400,000 people living on Supplementary Benefit; now there are some thing like eight million dependent on it. The numbers out of work, grappling with the increased burden of poverty which unemployment brings, has risen during this time from 330,000 to over three million.

Working class poverty cannot be dealt with by piecemeal reforms, treated as if it were separate from the other problems produced by capitalism. The facts point to the irresistible conclusion, that the CPAG has devoted a lot of energy and a lot of ingenuity to raising hopes only for them to be clashed against harsh reality. It would have been better for them to have assessed the true nature of the problem they were facing and then campaigned for the abolition of the cause of poverty. For if capitalism is allowed by its poverty-stricken people to continue there will still be a CPAG, or its equivalent, in another 21 years time. And another. And another.

South American headache

"One of our team's first problems there was what to do with almost 100 orphaned children who had been trained in torture. Their speciality was pulling out eyes". These chilling words by Dr Nacho Maldonado Allende. psychoanalyst and co-ordinator of an international team of mental health workers in Nicaragua are reported in the June/July issue of Open Mind, journal of the National Association for Mental Health.

Getting across basic elements of mental health care in Nicaragua is a much more primitive and elementary matter than even the disgracefully inadequate facilities in this country allow. The team exchanged ideas and shared knowledge with the local peasants they were training, rather than trying to impose professional expertise. Alcoholism is a problem in Nicaragua as almost everywhere else. When asked what should be done about it. the locals replied "Do nothing. We are deprived and for the moment we need it to help us ". If they paused to work it out, workless, homeless and at times hungry workers in Glasgow. Belfast and Birmingham would give the same reply.

Dr Allende's team found many Nicaraguans suffering from what he described as "frozen grief". People who had. for instance, suffered the loss of a close relative, appeared cheerful but their suppressed sorrow and frustration surfaced in headaches, insomnia, numbed limbs.

While there are degrees of deprivation and suppression, workers throughout the world face the same problems of capitalism. Those who dispute this might well ask themselves the real reason the next time they suffer a headache or sleepless night.

Lather and whitewash (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Power, sex. greed and money". Not another Sun story about an indiscreet bishop, but the necessary ingredients of a successful American soap opera — according to Leonard Katzman. a producer of Dallas. But for a low-temperature wash, many people prefer the more mundane soaps like Coronation Street. Harry Kershaw, one of its writers and producers, has attributed the programme's success to the fact that "it is a folk opera in praise of, for want of a better phrase, the ordinary people of Britain".

Do you follow a soap opera? Millions do. In California ABC TV broadcasts continuous soap opera from 11am to 3pm every day, while the daily output of Americas three network channels is 11 hours of soap with an average audience of about 35,000,000. In Britain, East Enders glues 23,000.000 viewers to BBC 1 twice a week. Coronation Street enjoys about 10,000,000 visitors and Brookside corners a respectable 7,000,000.

The label "soap opera" was first attached to dramatic sagas broadcast by American radio in the 1930s. Drama of this sort was found to be the cheapest way of filling in the gaps between the commercials for detergents which sponsored the radio shows. Many radio soaps are still very popular, including The Archers, which has a weekly audience of about 3,000,000. Some soap addicts can become a little over-credulous and write letters to the drama characters as if they were real people:

Dear Angie,

There's no doubt in my mind now what you should do about Den. Leave him and The Queen Vic and start a new life for yourself. When I left my Terry six years ago . . .

Every week, the television studios receive many letters of love, hate, advice and enquiry relating to people who do not exist. The deluded letter-writers may number only a few but there are undoubtedly millions of people who allow the characters and events of the soaps to become a part of their mental social circles. Whatever you think about soap operas, they are a reasonably influential medium in our society and for that reason, deserving of comment by socialists.

There are many television programmes in this category: Sons and Daughters, Albion Market, Emmerdale Farm, A Country Practice, The Young Doctors, Crossroads and so forth. They are a massively popular form of entertainment — mass commodities, as widely consumed as coke or crisps. But unlike coke or crisps soap operas affect us socially. They promote certain ideas as being worthy of our approval and certain ideas are dealt with in ways which subtly invite disapproval. Someone once described much of what is broadcast on television as "chewing gum for the eyes '. Following soap operas in a relatively uncritical frame of mind over a number of years by way of relaxation will fortify certain popular prejudices about the world. The boundaries of the television fantasies have recently been extended into an accompanying literature. There are over a dozen magazines in America devoted to providing gossip, interviews and story-updates connected with the TV soaps. Soap Opera Digest, the market leader in the USA has a readership of over 4.000.000. In Britain the tabloid press has widened its coverage of the private lives of the famous soap actors and actresses, sometimes going to extraordinary reaches of triviality to dredge up a story. Take as one example the front page of the Daily Star earlier this year — a colour photograph of East Enders Dirty Den (actor Leslie Grantham) meeting Coronation Street's Ken Barlow (actor Bill Roache). There was no real story of any consequence other than the fact that they met. One newspaper editor has suggested that.

Soap operas are as much a part of the national fabric as Sunday Lunch Our readers spend a lot of time watching TV (the national average is about 20 hours per week) and we reflect their interests; part of the success of East Enders comes from the very real characters and very real situations which our readers identify with. (Philip Walker, Deputy Editor, Daily Mirror)

Whether they deal with the pressures of life in a humdrum working-class community or the extravagant affairs of tycoon terrain, the purpose of the soaps is to portray what some drama critics have called a "slice of life". Before making comment on the social effect of these programmes a few observations should be made about life outside of the box. Slices of what, in other words, do the dramas seek to depict?

Life outside the box

The society we inhabit — all over the world — is completely dominated by the commercial system, the profit system. It is a class-divided society in which a very small minority of women and men, between them, own and control all of the world's resources. The majority of us own nothing to speak of except our ability to work. We therefore need to sell ourselves to an employer (a company, local government, the state) in order to earn a living. The minority are able to live lives of material luxury from unearned incomes through rent, interest and dividends. It is a society divided between those who produce all of the wealth and possess nothing and those who produce nothing but possess virtually all of the wealth. A class of legalised robbers control society and it is at their behest that we are thrown out of work when it no longer becomes profitable to employ us. It is also at their behest that governments pitch young men and women into war to slaughter strangers when their economic interests — trade routes, key areas on the trade map and regions representing important markets — are threatened.

If you are in any doubt about the nature of the class society you live in consider the evidence. In 1986 government sources show that the top 10 per cent of the population own 54 per cent of all marketable wealth, and most of the rest is owned by a small percentage of people directly below the top 10 per cent. If you are working-class in Britain today, your child is twice as likely to die at birth than children from the wealth-owning class. Richard Wilkinson of the Centre for Medical Research (University of Sussex) has pointed to "a clear widening of differences in death rates and in life expectancy between social classes. Infant mortality figures which have been released, show that mortality rates are now increasing in lower social classes while they continue to fall among the more privileged". A recent report by the Office of Health Economics suggests that up to 1,000,000 people in Britain are suffering from mild mental handicap because of poverty rather than any detectable brain damage. (Mental Handicap: Partnership in the Community? 1986.)

Capitalism is a society of contradictions because its main aim is the quest for profit and not the satisfaction of human need. There are now more "surplus" bricks in Britain than ever before. There are about 400,000 construction workers who want to work but who are prevented from doing so because it is not profitable for them to be employed. Alongside this stagnant potential — enforced by the economic interests of the construction industry shareholders — there are an estimated 70,000 homeless families. Earlier this year, in July, there was a move in the London borough of Tower Hamlets to "solve" the acute housing problem there by dumping many of the 650 desperately needy families into a redundant passenger ship in the Thames and calling it a "floating home scheme" While this piece of imaginative inhumanity was being seriously discussed by the local authority pundits in their forlorn efforts to patch up the perennial problems of the profit system, there was no shortage of luxury homes (for the right sort of person) being advertised in the "quality" press. From Berwick to Belgravia, 40 acres . . . 50 acres . . . 2,000 acres, swimming pools, private cinemas, all you need is a tidy £500.000 and that will do nicely.

Under the commercial system, the majority of people experience life in a weak and strenuous fashion, like a person with nasal congestion trying to breathe fresh air. We live in an atmosphere of stifled creativity where the human potential for imaginative flair is choked and suppressed by routine and wage-slavery. Gazing at soap operas, slumped in an armchair with a cup of tea, is an example of the perverse pleasures we are encouraged to enjoy.

What socialists want the working class to do — what we are organised to achieve — is to abolish this social system and establish in its place a classless, moneyless society. A society without property relationships, employers or employees — a society where the sole principle of production will be "from each according to their ability, to each according to their self-determined needs". No legislative reform can make any significant difference to the basis of class-society. Socialism is the only thing worth acting for. Do soap operas help or hinder the revolution in social ideas which is necessary for the majority of people to establish socialism?

Soaps as soap boxes for socialism?

Most soap operas have no distinct social message, let alone a message for social change. Channel 4's Brookside though, does have a reputation for advocating changes to benefit workers, or at any rate it is supposed to expose aspects of capitalism which cause working-class misery. Jimmy McGovern, one of Brookside's scriptwriters has said.

I can have more effect as regards the bringing forward of an alternative society than Howard Brenton (the playwright) could ever have. It's a cosy programme but a powerful speech coming from a character you know and love can have a great impact — there is a potential for really subversive drama and it's exploited now and again. There will always be the argument that it's losing its balls, but that will go on forever — and that's good.

(Guardian, 9 July 1986)

In my own view, Brookside usually produces a very high quality of drama but politically it clearly opposes socialist arguments. Several of the programme's scriptwriters are self-avowed supporters of the Labour Party and the continuing political implication of Brookside's script is that a Labour government replacing the Conservative one is something that workers should aim for. This message is not expressed to the viewer directly but by a subtle process of showing a selective series of workers' experiences, seen from a particular point of view and scripting the characters to form certain conclusions which their subsequent experiences demonstrate to be "right" or "wrong".

It should not be forgotten that the Labour Party stands for the continuation of capitalism. It professes to be able to preside over the profit system in a way which benefits employees and that is an impossible objective, like trying to run slavery in the interests of the slaves. Labour administrations have been in government for about half the time since 1966. During that time the basic wealth structure has remained almost exactly the same. Labour governments have developed the nuclear bomb, introduced the vicious Special Patrol Group (now re-labelled). broken strikes, frozen wages and sent workers to war to protect the economic interests of the bosses. Compared with the quality of medicine available in the opulent, high-tech private hospitals, the NHS only offers a second-rate first-aid service because of the financial constraints it suffers. This is not surprising when you consider that its purpose, as implied in the Beveridge Report which proposed the NHS, was to mend broken workers with as little cost and fuss as possible. Yet there is in Brookside a recurring innuendo that the NHS is essentially a good idea which just needs a bit more money.

It has also been argued that soaps about working-class life, especially programmes like Coronation Street, help foster a better class consciousness by allowing workers to see their own plight through other characters. at a distance on the box. With your own problems, the argument runs, you're so entangled that you can't really see the wood for the trees. Watching the struggles of wage-slavery as an armchair observer rather than a hassled participant is supposed to provide a sharper picture of what's wrong with society. The trouble is that there is absolutely no evidence to support this argument. How many socialists has 25 years of Coronation Street produced? There can be no substitute for direct and clear socialist argument. Before socialism can be established there will have to be a revolution in the ideas of the majority of people. Such a change of ideas will not come about if we rely on people reading between the lines of television drama and forming the uniform conclusion that wage-slavery must be abolished.

Then there are the American soaps. It has been said, perhaps not very seriously, that programmes like Dallas, Dynasty and The Colbys help fuel the class war by flaunting the ostentatious wealth of the privileged. By showing how the idle rich live, the programmes are alleged to be encouraging some viewers to see this social parasitism for what it is. Certainly, these serials don't skimp on the spectacular. Dallas (the most commercially lucrative programme in the world) is produced as five-star escapism. Chic fashion, lavish decor, sumptuous food and drink. All this interwoven with the torrid affairs of the tycoons, as active with their bed sheets as their balance sheets as they glide through the pleasures of their latest company merger.

We are invited to sit in poverty and peer at their prosperity. A prosperity which has been produced by us, not them. It's all a bit twisted when you think about it. Most avid viewers when asked for their opinion about this sort of programme reply along the lines of saying it’s exciting to watch and it would be nice to' have that sort of money. Nothing more or less than that. To have no ambition beyond getting vicarious pleasure from watching your exploiters revel in the wealth which we produce is to be played for a sucker.

It must be concluded that there is nothing to speak of in any of the soaps which does anything to promote the cause of socialism.

Soaps and brainwashing

Most soap operas, for most of the time, play a part in confirming social prejudices which support capitalism. Implicit in the drama, or as the critics say "written into the sub-text", are all sorts of notions about the world we live in. Many of these are quite wrong, would not stand up to scrutiny nor cope with the evidence of history, biology, anthropology or political economy. Yet tucked away securely in-between the lines they never have to come out to defend themselves. They satisfy themselves with being self-evident truths rather in the way monarchs who could think of no other justification for tyranny would claim to be ruling by divine right. What are these notions tacitly accepted by soap scripts? They include the ideas that people suffer from something horrible called "human nature" — an incurable condition which can only be softened or controlled but never removed. It means that people are innately anti-social and irrational. Other assumptions include the idea that the majority of people are not intelligent or responsible enough to exist socially without bosses, political leaders and police forces to keep them in order.

The television programmes reinforce the prejudices of the commercial system in two ways. One is by showing a picture of society in which particular institutions are presented, like day and night, as being a part of an inevitable scheme. So you get rich people and poor people, peace time and war time, palaces and prisons. You are encouraged to lament the worst horrors these contradictions cause but never to question the need for the institutions themselves. The other way that the programmes give a misleading picture of society is by what they don't show rather than what they do show. It is not just swearing (which is carefully edited out of the "realistic" soaps); neither the more gruesome parts of working class suffering nor the sheer bloody monotony of daily routine are presented on the programmes.

That the programmes create a sort of resignation in many people to the problems of class-society is not so surprising when you consider the essentially conservative outlook of some of the influential writers. Harry Kershaw has been involved in Coronation Street as a writer and producer since it began. Commenting on the Street's audience over the last 25 years he has said it

. . . may have become a little richer, a little healthier, and rather better informed but, basically, they still have the same worries and the same aspirations as they had 25 years ago. The car in the garage and the VCR next to the TV set may point to material change but the important factors of life remain the same.

(Coronation Street 1960-1985)

He may be right in the sense that politically nothing has really changed for the working class over the past 25 years but programmes like Coronation Street do nothing to alter the route of the grim march hitherto going nowhere.

Finally, consider the view of Agnes Nixon, a prolific writer for American soap opera and the creator of three of them from scratch. Barry Norman asked her what she thought was good about soap operas. "In soap operas" she replied, "everyday is a new day just as in our lives and we can't predict what will happen in our lives from day to day. We sort of think and plan, fools that we are. and think that we can have some control over our destiny and we have none." (Barry Norman's Guide to American Soaps, 1986). No control over our destiny? It's all in the lap of the Gods? There's one life for your JRs and one for your Jack Duckworths and there's nothing we can do about it — fools that we are? Are we? Are you?

Gary Jay

Blogger's Note:

On a related note, the following year Steve Coleman wrote a similar type 'soap operas are "chewing gum for the eyes" ' piece in his Between the Lines column and it was subject to a sneering smear attack from the Sunday tabloid, the Sunday People. For more background on what actually happened, click on the link. Sadly, I didn't see this hit piece at the time . . . we were a News of the World and Sunday Mirror household.

Who needs schools? (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is September. The prison gates must be unlocked and the young people who must be taught a lesson or two are being returned to their place, to be instructed, shouted at, forced to memorise the often irrelevant — to have games played with their minds. When it is enacted by the master class that all children between the ages of five and sixteen shall be subjected to schooling they are doing our class no favours: they are endeavouring to catch early the impressionable minds of the young.

How valid is the analogy between school and prison? The more detached from the prison walls of the school one becomes the stranger it might seem, but to the children being schooled (not educated the two are different) the relationship between school and denial of freedom is all too clear. Schools are places where children, coming in with the innocent belief that they are at liberty in the world, are taught the firm conviction that to behave freely is a crime. They must learn to know their place.

Capitalism sends those who do not know their place to prison. It is done "for their own good". Children are told that schooling will be for their own good. In prison you obey orders or you are punished. And in school. Do not question orders. Do not question the right of the person giving orders to give them. They are dictators appointed by the state; the tax paying capitalist has invested good money so that the orders will be carried out

The prisoner is stripped of individuality and made to wear a uniform. So are school kids. In both cases, uniforms make identification and discipline easier. In prison you become a slave to routine. When a bell rings you eat, you exercise, you work, you slop out. In school, children learn to jump to the dictatorship of the bell: "Why are you outside after the bell has gone? It went five minutes ago. When the bell rings you must be in your proper place". Chimpanzees can be taught such bell-obedience: in a human being it is a descent, not progress.

In prison it is assumed that the prisoner can never be equal to those with authority over him. In schools, however clever the pupil becomes, the teacher will always be superior and one will teach while the other learns and never shall the roles be reversed. You are sent to prison for breaking socially-made rules called laws. Often this means you have stolen food because you are broke, an act which would not be criminal in a world without property. You are sent to school to learn how to accept the wisdom of insane socially-made rules. The "rehabilitated” prisoner, like the properly “educated" school student. is released in the hope that they will be a decently exploitable wage slave.

The function of schooling is to create little human commodities: neatly-packed, subservient embodiments of labour power, there to be exploited as wealth-producing wage slaves. A well-schooled young worker will be fit to go out into the market and sell themselves. The skill of the teacher is not to bring out from a child what it could be. but what the capitalist social system requires it to be. Eighty years ago the Report of the Consultative Committee to the Head of Education on Higher Elementary Schools was candid in explaining the declared needs of employers for which schools should cater:

. . boys and girls in their service should possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self- help, and pride in good work for its own sake whatever it might be. (1906 Report)

The Report complained that

Employers are said to be dissatisfied with much of the elementary education given, because the instruction, in so far as it is carried beyond the simplest elements, tends, if anything. to make a boy a little above his job.

The present recession has provided educational authorities with the ideal opportunity to make schooling more than ever a job-based process. It is all very well teaching children to express themselves freely through dance, say the traditionalists, but what good will that do them as training for a life behind the check-out counter in Tesco? The investors in Tesco need wage slaves who can add up (we can’t have Lady Porter short-changed. can we?) and not poets, dancers or inventors. So at school the child is taught to regard big ambitions as dreams for the back of the mind: the real objective must be to become a purchasable labour-power commodity.

Capitalism cannot cope with childhood. It needs children, because they represent the reproduction of labour power — new profit-makers for the future. But children must be censured for being childish. The great, civilised struggle for maturity must be entered as soon as possible. To be mature means to be as stupid as the others who have been conned by the system. A child is a dangerous being: not yet conditioned, not yet afraid to see the world as something to be shared. So schools keep children out of society's way. just as prisons keep others away until they are prepared to conform.

Workers need education but not schooling. Education means learning to know what is happening and why. In social terms, there can be no doubt that the working class needs to learn what is happening in the world and why. In this way we shall see the capitalist system as the cause of our problems and then the solution will be not far off. But working class self-education is very different from what passes as education in the capitalist school. From the earliest days socialists have rejected that schooling designed, not to expose social reality but to indoctrinate working class kids to “ honour the Queen, obey your superiors, and run away from every policeman" (Justice, 30 June 1894). It was not education for life, but propaganda for submission.

Many reformers of capitalism have engaged in several campaigns to humanise the education system: to make it useful, or at least better, for the working class. At the beginning of this century the Social Democratic Federation campaigned for free school dinners. It was in opposition to this piddling reformism that revolutionaries left the SDF. refusing to plead for bit-by-bit changes to the exploitation system. As with many reform campaigns, this one was never successful but parliament did grant free school milk which was subsequently withdrawn.

Immense reformist effort went into abolishing the old grammar school system. This fight was nominally won but comprehensive indoctrination has hardly changed the essential nature of the oppressive schooling process. Parent governors have been introduced even student governors — but they would be the first to concede (and often complain bitterly) that their views count for little in relation to the state s dictatorial control of schools. Another campaign has been to abolish public schools for the children of the privileged. Eight Labour governments have made noises about them, but not one has made a single move to abolish them.

When Neil Kinnock was shadow Education Minister he became a darling of the Labour Left by promising to put an end to privileged schooling. It will be worth watching his efforts in this direction if he becomes Prime Minister. The fact is that reformists have played around with the form of schooling. but none has proposed to revolutionise the function of education. This cannot be done in isolation from a socialist transformation of society, for it is only when commodity society has been transcended that commodity-based schooling can be removed. There have been a few inspired and brave efforts at establishing non-conventional schools ("free schools") within capitalism but they have had an uphill struggle within a social environment which cannot cope with freedom.

A socialist society will not need to mould children into servants of an omnipotent production process. In a world where the producer’s quality of life and the quality of the product will be equally valued there will be no requirement of a person but that they learn to live well, for part of living well is to live creatively and to give as well as to take. In a society of production for use the experience of education will cease to be a process which takes place in an institution under compulsion.

Whether the word "school" will survive or not we cannot forecast but that any socialist school would be unrecognisable in comparison with those of today is a matter of certainty. There will be no teachers who are not learners also; there will be no end to education but the satisfaction of human needs — a process which will not stop at eighteen or eighty. In chapter five of William Morris's News From Nowhere there is one great vision of what education might be like in a socialist society. It will be for the workers (and that includes children) who establish socialism to decide how to educate themselves and it will be for each generation to reexamine methods of learning and to assess their worth in the light of what it has produced in their elders.

The ultimate condemnation of capitalist "education" is that it has played a key role in producing capitalist-minded people. A society of people who love nations which they do not own. hate foreigners, are willing to kill in wars, offer themselves as victims to the profit system and obey those who abuse them, is a society of badly educated inhabitants. In a book called The School That I'd Like, compiled as a result of essays on the title submitted by school kids for a competition run by the Observer in December 1967. one girl of fifteen wrote that

I am tired of hearing that the hope of my country lies in my generation. If you give me the same indoctrination . . . how can you expect me to be any different from you?

Steve Coleman